A Farewell to Fores

09Nov

Many moons ago I applied for a job at a Swedish organisation called Fores. This is a green liberal think-tank who want to focus on solving our severe environmental problems by encouraging both big and small business to get involved.

Now regardless of your political leanings (and I am not at all sure of mine these days) this seemed like a fine idea and a great opportunity, even though the position itself was part-time and a bit vaguely defined.

However the people at Fores turned down my finely crafted application, told me the position basically did not exist any more, and sent me in return a question that went like this:

“Do you know anything about Macs? Because we need somebody to help us keep our Mac network working”.

Which unfortunately told me everything I needed to know about this workplace.

So today I wandered into their site to see how they are getting on and I stumbled onto their scientific advisory board. And my jaw slid open and remained there.

Check it out here. From of a list of 20 people, 2 of them are actual scientists and a further 2 are so vaguely defined that they may or may not be.

The remainder are economists, political scientists (not much to do with science, I think you will agree) and various scattered disciplines far removed from science and technology.

For the love of Jove, they even have a “Gender Researcher”, surely the bottom of the barrel when it comes to academic disciplines.

Conclusion: The “scientific advisors” are not at all scientists, and any advice they offer will be pretty hard to swallow. Which makes the whole idea kind of pointless.